Epiphany 4B, January 31, 2021, The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz.

O God of Compassion, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

This past week I was reminded in our scripture readings for today of a poem from Howard Thurman’s Meditations of the Heart, entitled “Life Goes On.” He wrote it in 1953. Like our scripture readings, it seems to have been written for 2021. [1] It begins:

During these turbulent times we must remind ourselves repeatedly that life goes on.
This we are apt to forget. The wisdom of life transcends our wisdoms; the purpose of life outlasts our purposes; the process of life cushions our processes. The mass attack of disillusion and despair, distilled out of the collapse of hope, has so invaded our thoughts that what we know to be true and valid seems unreal and ephemeral. There seems to be little energy left for aught but futility. This is the great deception. By it whole peoples have gone down to oblivion without the will to affirm the great and permanent strength of the clean and the commonplace. Let us not be deceived.

In our reading from Deuteronomy this morning, we hear a portion of Torah teaching about maintaining the welfare of the community. It comes after this instruction, “If there is among you anyone in need within the land that you inhabit, do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted toward your needy neighbor. You should rather open your hand . . . give liberally and be ungrudging when you do so . . . open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor.” When you hear people talking about an “Old Testament God,” it’s always worth remembering and responding that compassion is an ordering principle for Torah.

Moses was giving assurance to the people that the Holy One raises up prophets for the community in every generation. Moses said, “Pay attention to them because this is what you asked for.” I love the line “If I hear the voice of the Lord my God anymore, I will die.” I don’t think we need to take that literally any more than we should take verse 15 literally when it says that someone who offers prophesy in the name of other gods or says what has not been commanded will die. The truth is we’re all going to die sooner or later. What comes in the next two verses after our reading says, “You may wonder, ‘How can we recognize a word that the Lord has not spoken?’ If a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord but the thing does not take place or prove true, it is a word that the Lord has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously; do not be afraid of him.” In other words, do not be afraid, just do the next right thing yourselves.

In commentary on this passage, the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks explained that Biblical prophecy is not the same as prediction. Because of free will, human future cannot be reliably predicted. Rabbi Sacks taught: “A [biblical] prophet does not foretell. He [or she] warns. A prophet does not speak to predict future catastrophe but rather to avert it… The real test of prophecy is not bad news but good. Calamity, catastrophe, disaster prove nothing… It is only by the realization of a positive vision that prophecy is put to the test. So it was with Israel’s prophets…They warned of the dangers that lay ahead. But they were also… agents of hope. [looking] …beyond the catastrophe to the consolation. That is the test of a true prophet.” [2] Look for and listen to prophets who see beyond the catastrophe to the consolation of returning to right relationship with one another and with the Divine. “Let us not be deceived,” Howard Thurman writes, and his poem continues:

It is just as important as ever to attend to the little graces by which the dignity of our lives is maintained and sustained. Birds still sing; the stars continue to cast their gentle gleam over the desolation of the battlefields, and the heart is still inspired by the kind word and the gracious deed. There is no need to fear evil. There is every need to understand what it does, how it operates in the world, what it draws upon to sustain itself. We must not shrink from the knowledge of the evilness of evil.

In our Epistle, Paul (a true prophet) was writing to the gathered community in Corinth to address a conflict about ethical behavior when it came to eating meat that had been sacrificed to idols. Some people in the community were using the power of their intellectual reasoning or theological knowledge to trip up people who were not as educated. Paul was cautioning them not to let their exousia – their strength, liberty, authority–hurt others. For Paul, love, not knowledge, must be the ordering principle, the ultimate authority. Individual adjustments in behavior must be made to benefit the communal body, with love, for love.

This exousia that Paul is talking about is also at the heart of our Gospel lesson from Mark. Exousia, translated as authority, also means liberty or strength. Jesus taught with it, with a kind of vigor and freedom that those employed as religious scholars did not have, in Mark’s opinion. It’s possible to read this as descriptive and not derogatory language against the scribes. But it’s generally understood as a potshot at the religious scholars of the day. Mark had disparaging things to say about religious leaders dozens of times. Mark’s words signal an internal conflict within Judaism that would eventually grow into violent Christian anti-Judaism. I don’t want to linger there, and yet I cannot let it go without comment, when the Ark of the Covenant is in my peripheral view. Episcopalians actually are quite like the scribes. Scholarship, tradition, laws, and scripture matter to us. Let’s not denigrate scribes in any age.

Jesus’ first work of wonder (some would say a miracle), according to Mark, took place on the Sabbath in a synagogue, when a contaminated spirit inside a guy started shouting at Jesus. The polluted spirit in the guy asked Jesus, “have you come to destroy us?” And Jesus commanded the unclean spirit – the demon – to be silent and come out of the man. In other words, yes, if destroy means clean up, yes Jesus had come to clean up the mess of unclean spirits. What Jesus told the unclean spirit is “shut up and get out of him!” Jesus did not say, “be silent” to the demon. Jesus did not say, “let’s talk.” Jesus said, literally, “put a muzzle on it” to the polluted spirit that was occupying or pre-occupying a man in the gathering of the faith community in Capernaum. Jesus didn’t make the man leave. He made the unclean spirit leave. He did what he could to restore the man to community.

Mark wants us to know there was something about Jesus’ teaching that was powerful, authoritative and liberating — thrilling to some folks and disturbing to others –healing for some and threatening to others. Exousia is most often associated with casting out demons in Mark’s Gospel. (The idea of demons emerged in 3rd century BCE Jewish literature as a way to explain the experience of evil.) [3] You know, in Mark, demons always know that Jesus is the Holy One of God – the disciples don’t seem to get it, but the demons always do. In fact, in Mark, one real sign of the effectiveness of Jesus’ ministry is when oppressive forces start screaming bloody murder. And Jesus demonstrated surprising authority (strength or license) over those oppressive forces that backed people into narrow places, that pushed people down, that put the squeeze on, that limited life and freedom, and alienated people from each other and from their true selves. Jesus wasn’t only proclaiming release – he was enacting it, demonstrating that compassion is an ordering principle for Gospel. Howard Thurman concludes:

We must not shrink from the knowledge of the evilness of evil. Over and over we must know that the real target of evil is not destruction of the body, the reduction to rubble of cities; The real target of evil is to corrupt the [human] spirit of … and to give [our souls] the contagion of inner disintegration. When this happens, there is nothing left, the very citadel of [humanity] is captured and laid waste. Therefore the evil in the world around us must not be allowed to move from without to within. This would be to be overcome by evil. To drink in the beauty that is within reach, to clothe one’s life with simple deeds of kindness, to keep alive a sensitiveness to the movement of the spirit of God in the quietness of the human heart and in the workings of the human mind— this is as always the ultimate answer to the great deception.

I bet many of us believe in demons when they’re defined as what alienates people from each other and from their (our) true selves. So I wonder, how do we get what terrifies us or shames us into alienation, into division and estrangement, out of our heads, and out of our communal psyches? I don’t want to suggest that we should all become Jerks for Jesus, shouting “shut up and get out!” But I do think we become under-confident, under-reverent about our own God-given authority and power to set others free and to save lives.

What if we stopped shrinking from or tolerating those unclean spirits – those oppressive forces — those demons – that terrify us or shame us into alienation, separation and estrangement? What if we could get clearer that forces which alienate and diminish the integrity and dignity of human beings, are decidedly unwelcome? I’m talking about forces like enmity, cruelty, jealousy, greed, disregard, domination, shame, the list goes on and on. By contrast, exousia comes from truth telling, accountability, the assertion of human integrity and dignity, giving and receiving love, even in the midst of struggle. Asserting exousia recalls the spirit back to its divine task, which is to serve the well-being of the world. I want us to continue to expand our capacity for assertive and non-violent responses to the unclean or diseased spirits that shout in our own heads, in our homes, in our parish, on the street – wherever.

Because next Sunday Emmanuel Church will hold our Annual Meeting, I have been swimming in the annual report contributions from all parts of our life together as a parish, during nearly a year of covid-tide. There are draft copies available for you in the main lobby and on-line. I encourage you to read it. I think you’ll be as amazed and inspired as I am by the depth and reach of the ministry of this parish, which serves the needs of the wider community every day around the clock: people seek us out to pray for help, to pray in thanks, and to pray in wonder; to listen, to speak, to sing, to play; to be quiet and to make noise (sometimes a lot of noise); to cook, to serve, to eat, to eliminate; to heal, to sleep, to get woke; to remember, to forget, to meet; to offer assistance and receive assistance; to get their hands dirty and to get clean; to practice; to try again and again; to engage, to rest from engaging; to work, to have fun; to set free and to get free; to deliver and to be delivered; to warm up, to cool off; to create and recreate. What every single person has in common, as far as I can tell, is a deep desire to be believed and to be beloved, which requires a great deal of compassion from everyone involved.

Fortunately, compassion is cultivated and harvested here at Emmanuel Church, and that is something we have in common with Capernaum – the home base of Jesus’ ministry. Our English rendering of Capernaum completely obscures its meaning. If you go there today, you’ll see the sign for the archeological dig and you’ll understand that Capernaum is a compound of two words – Kfar (which means village) and Nahum (which means compassion or comfort). Kfar Nahum means Village of Compassion. And get this: according to archaeologists, 1st century Capernaum was a village of about 1500 people. Emmanuel Church is a village of compassion about the same size when you count up the number of people who come in and out of our physical or virtual doors in a typical week.

Our appointed collects and hymns today plead for peace. But I want us to be clear that the peace of God doesn’t come by simply silencing loud or otherwise disturbing voices. The peace of God comes by just distribution of resources, and the just distribution of resources comes from treating one another with kindness, and repairing and restoring community in ever widening and deepening circles. I urge you to find ways to work for peace by engaging as fully as you can in this or any other community where compassion is grown; where compassion is the ordering principle.

← Back to sermons page